Christmas 1C, 2006
Luke 2:40-52
AN INFATUATION WITH THE POSSIBLE
End of a year.
End of an era.
Belinda Emmett. Peter Brock. Steve Irwin.
Betty Friedan. Pro Hart. Don Chip. All died.
Lincoln Hall, Todd Russell, Brant Webb and Sophie Delezio, cheated death.
But what will we do now that Thorpie, ‘Pigeon’ and Warnie have retired.
Is this the end of the world?
And here we are on New Year’s eve
“and we barely had the chance to celebrate Christmas, at least in the church!” (B Epperly. P&F web site).
oo0oo
One of the great mysteries of life is the mystery of time.
Everything that happens to us,
happens to us in and through time.
Time, called a day, can weigh us down or raise us up.
Yet this day... this time, vanishes. This is an incredible fact.
When we look behind us,
we do not see our past standing there in a series of day shapes.
We can not wander back through the gallery of our past.
Our days have disappeared.
Our future time has not yet arrived.
The only ground of time is the present moment.
The time or years of childhood through youth to adulthood
seem implied by this morning’s storyteller’s words:
The child Jesus grew into a mature adult, filled with wisdom,
and God regarded him favourably...
That’s it! Not much content.
No clues by which to judge how he progressed
from saying ‘mum’ and ‘dad-dad’
to pronouncing ‘messianic’ and ‘anthropomorphic’!
Or how many learned responses lead from his first cry
to the singing of a country music classic!
Just plenty of gaps.
And we are left to wonder or speculate.
Yet that moment in time... that temple experience
can serve as a model for growing up and growing in wisdom.
One overseas colleague puts it like this:
“On the verge of adulthood, Jesus retreats to the temple for theological reflection and questioning... (His) three days in the temple were a pivotal point in his spiritual evolution. Jesus grew in spiritual stature by claiming his faith tradition faithfully and then extending its experiential and theological boundaries to new horizons” (B Epperly. P&F web site).
So let’s play with that comment in our imaginations for a moment.
The child Jesus grew into a mature adult, filled with wisdom,
and God regarded him favourably...
And to do so I want to be suggestive about a couple of words:
Grew
Wisdom
1. Grew
The biblical storytellers tell us very little
other than implying that Jesus managed to complete the
complex,
intricate,
mostly mysterious process of growing up.
From being a helpless baby he progressed to adulthood, where he was
capable of holding down a job, making and keeping friends,
theorising about the origins of things, separating fancy from fact,
getting angry without having to hurt others,
caring for others without needing to possess them (Purdy 1993).
In him both nature and nurture did their necessary work.
“The child Jesus grew into a mature adult, filled with wisdom,
and God regarded him favourably...”
2. Wisdom
And Jesus discovered that
a fool and his money are soon parted,
the love of money is the root of many evils,
you cannot tell a book by its cover.
He learned that power corrupts,
that an army marches on its stomach,
and if you would teach a hungry man,
first you had better feed him (Purdy 1993).
He learned that sin and sickness
are not necessarily the two sides of the same coin,
that the devil can quote scripture,
and a smile sometimes is a mask for hate.
Through all this
“The child Jesus grew into a mature adult, filled with wisdom,
and God regarded him favourably...”
oo0oo
Our storyteller Luke is very sketchy on the detail.
Indeed, we have only the barest of fragments or outline.
We have to fill in that outline with what we know about childhood.
Because the only childhood truly accessible to us is our own.
To live life to the full
To love wastefully.
To be all that we can be... paraphrasing Bishop Jack Spong,
can be challenging and risky business.
Yet I am reminded of what I consider to be some more wise words,
by British theologian and (another) retired bishop, John Tinsley, when he
wrote in one of his pastoral letters 20 years ago:
“A lot of our endeavour (as church) has gone into taking the risk out of faith... We try to create a hideout for faith where we can be unpreturbed” (Tinsley 1990:438-39).
Our congregations can become hideouts for some of us.
For we can forget that we always live
on the edge of something new.
That’s the risk.
To live on the edge of something new.
How we meet that ‘risk’ or that ‘new’
is an important moment in time.
Let me return to my overseas colleague whose words I reckon, continue to be helpful:“Growing in wisdom and stature calls us to take our faith seriously enough to study scripture, wrestle with traditional theological doctrines, explore new images of God, Christ, and salvation, and spend time in prayer, meditation, and service. A growing faith is not accidental, but requires going to our own spiritual ‘temple’ regularly to listen, ask, and share. Even Jesus was unfinished and incomplete” (B Epperly. P&F web site).
So with all the will I can muster, I encourage you to greet
the new horizons in this coming year and in our own particular situations,
with an “infatuation with the possible” (E Bloch, quoted in H Cox 1964:10)
without which our congregational and personal life
is just unthinkable.
And then maybe it can be said of us all:
These people... these congregations, grew into a mature adulthood,
filled with wisdom, and God regarded them favourably...
Notes:
Cox H. 1964. On not leaving it to the snake. NY: New York. Macmillan
Purdy J C. 1993. God with a human face. KN: Louisville. Westminster/John Knox.
Tinsley J. 1990. Tell it slant. The christian gospel and its communication. IN: Bristol. Wyndham Hall Press.